Our Man in Havana

Fidel Castro had just taken over Cuba when filming on Our Man in Havana began in April, 1959. He and Che Guevara dropped in on the set and fraternized with the cast; Maureen O’Hara was quite taken by Che, “a real freedom fighter,” in her words. This from a woman who adored John Wayne and Ronald Reagan.

I wonder what Fidel and Che made of Ernie Kovacs, who played the Havana police chief Captain Segura mostly for laughs. His real-life counterpart, Esteban Ventura Novo, was a notorious torturer. Graham Greene alluded to this sinister side of Segura’s character in the book. “There are people who expect to be tortured,” he tells the hapless vacuum cleaner salesman and reluctant spy Wormold (Alec Guinness), “and others who’d be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement.”

Wormold, a middle-class Brit, does not belong to “the torturable class,” Segura blithely admits, whereas the poor in Cuba, and throughout Latin America, apparently do. Greene’s irony comes across better in the book, although Kovacs is brilliant in the checkers game, where the two adversaries use miniature liquor bottles in place of checkers.

I loved the novel, but I love the film even more. Besides Guinness, O’Hara, and Kovacs, you’ve got Noel Coward as the urbane (and slightly ridiculous) recruiter of secret agents, Hawthorne, and Ralph Richardson as the even more ridiculous spymaster “C.”  Burl Ives plays Dr. Hasselbacher, an emigré with a communist past. In real life, Ives had just named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the film, he betrays Wormold, his only friend, then has second thoughts.

Our Man in Havana would be Greene’s final collaboration with director Carol Reed. It’s more light-hearted than the pair’s most indelible project, The Third Man, but still packs a punch. Viewed with a daiquiri in hand, it goes down quite smoothly.